Translation by Iterative Collaboration between Monolingual U

Human translation is expensive and slow, and often unavailable between uncommon language pairs. Machine translation is inexpensive and fast, but quality remains unreliable. In an effort to find a balance between speed and quality, we describe a new iterative translation process designed to leverage the massive number of online users who have limited or no bilingual skill. The iterative process is supported by combining existing machine translation methods with monolingual human speakers. We are building a publicly available prototype on the Web that is capable of yielding high quality translations at drastically reduced expense. In this talk, I will describe our translation model, and show our early prototype. This work is being done in collaboration with Philip Resnik at UMD.

Benjamin B. Bederson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the previous director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and iSchool at the University of Maryland. His research is on mobile device interfaces, information visualization, interaction strategies, digital libraries, and accessibility issues such as voting system usability. He is also cofounder and Chief Scientist of Zumobi, a mobile media company.